The Science Creative Quarterly

By joelpel

Joel Pel is one of those engineers in biology. Although he wasn’t writing Fortran code for Mandelbrot patterns at a young age, he has recently done so in what can best be described as an attempt to get back to his roots. He does, however, like to think of himself as a well rounded man of many interests, contrary to what the engineering stereotype would like to permit. Too bad the very fact that his name is attached to this article probably indicates otherwise.

There are many laws in the physical sciences, most of which have mathematical equations that govern them. Widely know laws such as the laws of electricity and magnetism, have Maxwell’s equations. Fluid-flow is governed by the Navier-Stokes equations, and of course everyone is familiar with Einstein’s energy to mass relation, E=mc2. Why then does an equally relevant and useful law, Murphy’s Law, have no such foundational equation? In what follows I present an equation to predict the outcome of Murphy’s Law. The law, in its simplest form, states: “If anything can possibly go wrong, it will, and at the worst…

“And there are even some engineers in this [biology] class!” – a seemingly innocent remark, but one that contains sentiments often expressed in the biological realm: engineers just don’t really fit in. At first glance, nothing seems out of the ordinary with this statement – and both parties would probably agree – of course engineers don’t fit in. There is just something fundamentally different between these two disciplines, the respective parties would say (or between biology and the other physical sciences, for that matter). An attempt to justify this would then be given in some remark about engineers being good…

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